Unearthing Reasons to Be Pretty’

When David Marcia hears the words “reasons to be pretty,” he envisions them scrawled across the top of a blackboard, as if such words were the heading for what would, no doubt, be a vainglorious list.

Instead, those puzzling words make up the title of a compelling character study, penned by a playwright known for painting not-so-pretty pictures of the human condition. Neil LaBute authored the play as the ultimate work in a trilogy that examines modern culture’s preoccupation with beauty and body image. Marcia, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Missouri, is directing a production opening Wednesday.

Labeled magnificent or misanthropic — sometimes both at once — LaBute is the scribe of plays and films such as “In the Company of Men” and “Your Friends and Neighbors.” He is often cast as one who traffics in a sort of twisted morality — his characters saying and doing things that are dubious at best. Yet Marcia considers “Reasons to Be Pretty” more an ethical examination than a meditation on morality; here, we find four lower-middle-class 20-somethings trying to do right, even if their perspective proves skewed. Their viewpoints on love, sex, beauty and friendship are put up on the stage for debate. Specifically, “Reasons to Be Pretty” asks us to consider at what cost and for what length of time these bonds should be preserved, Marcia said.

When the curtain comes up, the audience immediately finds itself immersed in an argument Marcia categorized as verbally violent, as all of one couple’s simmering tensions spill out and over the container of their relationship. The implications of that all-out assault reverberate throughout the play.

“It’s a play that shows you very clearly … that you can either love somebody or you can be right all the time, but you can’t do both,” he said. “One will kill the other really fast.”

LaBute’s main character is Greg (played here by Tamara Mullins), a “drifting” college dropout. Marcia said Greg is well-read, full of aspiration — or pretensions, depending on how you view him — but without drive or much basic empathy for his fellow man. Greg’s hairdresser girlfriend, and partner in volatility, is Stephanie (Maddie Byrne). “They’re one of those couples that I think a lot of us have known or been a part of. … They’re perfect for each other in that they are the worst people in the world for each other,” Marcia said.

The other perfectly flawed pair consists of Kent (Kristen Walker) and Carly (Stephanie Juergens). He is “a guy you probably knew in high school,” with “two tools in his box — one is to be charming and funny, and the other is to be threatening or dismissive,” Marcia said. In a very striking way, Carly illustrates that there can be a downside to being beautiful, Marcia said, as she experiences discrimination of a different sort. She is “a beautiful woman who’s not nearly as stupid and fragile as people think she is — and, by this, I mean that she’s not stupid or fragile at all.

“Of all the people in this play, she’s probably the only one you’d want to sit down and talk to, the only one you’d want to invite over for dinner,” he said. “The others spend most of the play stuck in their various shades of crazy.”

As the cast members interact with one another — and with a pair of characters Marcia said are invisible but invaluable — “Reasons to Be Pretty” becomes a mirror held before the audience’s face. He recounted running the play for crew members, most of whom are students ages 18 to 20, and watching as they seemed alternately fascinated and terrified; they perhaps walked away wondering if the characters’ reality is what awaits them in a serious relationship. Marcia thinks theatergoers of all ages and experiences will have their romantic tendencies and latent fears laid bare by the starkness of the script.

If you were paying attention to the preceding paragraphs, you noticed each cast member is a woman. Here, Marcia is pressing into an idea that is gaining steam, especially on the academic side of the theatrical ledger. Treating gender as one of the “given” or imagined circumstances in a play puts directors at liberty to cast the actors who are best together for the roles without caveat or concession. In auditions, it became clear to Marcia that the four best actors to re-create the tight-knit, dysfunctional relationships LaBute had written were four females. The actresses involved are wearing men’s clothing and, to some degree, adopting a “less feminine physicality,” Marcia said, but are not trying to impersonate men. “The idea is not to hide anything but not to accent anything, either,” he said. “It just is what it is.”

In a similar sense, Marcia is not hiding the “political” or social implications of such casting judgment calls. He hopes to generate a sense of equity, if not justice, in a world where most theaters, especially those at universities, are filled with more females than males. Yet, he’s not trying to overly accentuate the point, either — in this case, putting forth the best possible play is truly the thing. Marcia thinks after, at most, a scene or two, audiences will forget the names in the playbill and just see the humanity of the characters.

While casting is the most evident element in play, Marcia and company have worked to focus fully on the actors and their words. Set design, for example, is incredibly minimal. Marcia also enlisted old friend and renowned stage combat director Rick Sordelet, whose credits include more than 50 Broadway shows and several films, to bring the right sort of physicality to the stage. Ultimately, the goal is not to provide the audience reasons to be pretty but the opportunity to have a resonant experience and consider true-to-life questions with little distraction.

“What theater does best is not slice-of-life reality, I think,” Marcia said. “… I think the most interesting things on stage are true but not necessarily real. There’s a whole very rich world out there of things that are true but aren’t real necessarily. … I think the theater addresses those more ephemeral issues better than anything I know.”

“Reasons to Be Pretty” will appear at MU’s Corner Playhouse at 7:30 and 9:15 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, 7:30 p.m. Friday through Saturday and 2 p.m. next Sunday. Tickets are $8. theatre.missouri.edu.